The Monkey's Paw
by Rumour of an Alchemist
Summary: Alternate Universe. One-shot. On Hallowe'en of 1970 Lord Voldemort made three wishes upon a monkey's paw, forcibly diverting the course of events. Warning: Character deaths. Rating: 'M' on account of non-explicit 'suggestive' references.


Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter. I am not W. W. Jacobs either. I do not own the short story by W. W. Jacobs _The Monkey's Paw_.

Note: This piece is set in an alternate universe in which Lord Voldemort makes three wishes in 1970 using a extremely rare (and dangerous) artefact which wishes divert events from what would otherwise be the approximately canon course of the original seven books. This piece is (for now) a one-shot.

Warning: Character deaths. Non-explicit 'suggestive' references.

Rating: This piece is rated 'M', on account of references relating to an 'in-universe' publication _Aphrodite Uncloaked_ in the latter stages of the piece.

* * *

What does Lord Voldemort, one of the greatest dark wizards of the century, do upon coming by one of the 'wish-granting' artefacts known as a monkey's paw?

He uses it of course, on Hallowe'en night of 1970, because he is Lord Voldemort, and to his mind, he can word his three wishes sufficiently well to avoid any possible detrimental effects to himself.

He wishes for the Sword of Godric Gryffindor, and Lucius Malfoy brings it to him, Augustus Rookwood and the brothers Rabastan and Rodolphus Lestrange having died to procure it.

He wishes for Albus Dumbledore with no warning to be immediately buried under a mountain of rubble – and part of Hogwarts does indeed collapse, but Albus just so happens to be searching under a desk for something at that moment, and will turn out to survive, shaken but fundamentally unharmed.

He wishes for the greatest of his enemies, as yet unborn, to be wiped out of existence before even being conceived, and James Potter is killed in a freak accident in Dresden involving an American witch, a book of dark magic, and a fossil tyrannosaurus rex. Lord Voldemort hears of this latter, but has no means of knowing that it has to do with his third and last wish.

And that, as far as Lord Voldemort is concerned, is that. He is at least the Sword of Godric Gryffindor up – ahead on that count, even if he has no evidence that his other two wishes _have_ left him better off.

He burns the monkey's paw after that – he has had his wishes, and he has no desire for anyone else to potentially benefit from it, using it perhaps against _him_.

Lord Voldemort worded his wishes very cleverly indeed to try to avoid any possible comebacks for himself.

The law of a monkey's paw, that its use to try to change destiny to the benefit of a wisher will only bring them sorrow is almost stymied.

 _Almost_.

Harry Potter is undone – never to have existed. Fate however has half the vector which would have led to Harry Potter in place still. Fate gathers up the cards, shuffles the deck, and deals again.

Ten year old Lily Evans has nightmares that Hallowe'en night, about a dark wizard stroking and mumbling over a sinister talisman, cackling to himself. Lily Evans has nightmares – the would-have-been martyr at the epoch of Lord Voldemort's first great defeat, and the mother of the second wizarding war, who (though she does not know it) besides losing a death which would have seen her remembered in song and story for centuries has been robbed as well of her future would-have-been husband and her equally future would-have-been child.

As far as fate is concerned, Lily Evans gets no more say or choice in the new order of things than she would have done had Lord Voldemort _not_ used a monkey's paw. She is simply one in a selection of tools, to be used and used up as necessary in a war against a dark wizard who has just made the matter of his demise _highly personal_ for the generally impersonal.

Fate is _not_ something meant to be tempted. Not in the world of witches and wizards.

* * *

In the summer of 1971 Sybill Trelawney is touring muggle summer fairs, desperate to earn some cash with a 'fortune teller' turn.

The easiest sixpence she makes (to later be converted into wizarding currency) is from a red-headed girl with green eyes, who hands over the money, stares at her in awe, and then practically _runs_ out of the tent shouting out something about 'severance' or something like that, without Sybill being aware of having said or done anything.

Sybill Trelawney is completely unaware, of course, that she has just delivered a prophecy to Lily Evans.

Fate loving to torture Severus Snape, said prophecy included the news that Lily and her 'dark haired prince' would 'enter the house of the badger'.

How's that for a choice Severus; go into Hufflepuff or see Lily Evans with someone else who is to be 'her dark haired prince' there?

Because _that_ bit about the prince and the badger is part of the 'fortune teller's' rambling which Lily _does_ mention to Severus.

Some of the other bits of the prophecy which she was given involve words that Lily has to look up in a dictionary, and even once such 'clarifications' have been unearthed involves stuff which seems silly and unimportant to an eleven year old, in 1971 – and Lily certainly doesn't mention _those_ bits to Severus at all.

* * *

With a complete absence of prompting from fortune-tellers Sirius Black manages to get himself sorted into Hufflepuff in September of 1971. Maybe in another reality, where James Potter hadn't been killed in Dresden by a freak accident, Sirius and James would have met on the train and Sirius would have been sorted into Gryffindor, instead; in this reality, in which James Potter is an incidental casualty to Lord Voldemort's use of a monkey's paw, Sirius goes into Hufflepuff, because it's not Slytherin and he figures it's what will most upset his family.

Lily Evans is a _good girl_ (or at least one obedient to the promptings of a mysterious fortune teller) and gets herself sorted into Hufflepuff.

Added pressure on Severus Snape here – he's already seen Lily go into Hufflepuff, and now he notices again the earlier Sirius Black sorting. Sirius Black is dark-haired. Sirius Black is a Black, and everyone knows that they think of themselves as being aristocratic – and the Blacks are of course _rich_.

If Severus Snape had _needed_ any extra prompting to resist the Sorting Hat's effort to put him elsewhere, and to sit through one of the longest sortings of recent decades, this would be overkill.

Severus Snape goes to Hufflepuff… eventually.

None of the pupils which follow in alphabetical order from Severus Snape dare to argue with an exceedingly irate Sorting Hat, and the rest are dispatched with almost indecent speed.

The Sorting Hat has seen some of Severus' reasons for wanting to go to Hufflepuff, and it most definitely does not _approve_.

It couldn't do anything about it other than try to sort Severus elsewhere; it certainly isn't allowed to tell anyone or warn them that some sort of game is afoot; it went along with it, in the end, but it doesn't have to like it.

* * *

Severus Snape is concerned, mostly, by how charming Sirius Black manages to be at times, and is worried about this possible rival for Lily's attention.

Sirius Black isn't really bothered about Severus Snape, and throws himself stubbornly into being as much of a Hufflepuff as possible, just to annoy his mother. That means being friendly (and especially associating with social inferiors) and being hard-working, just for the sake of being hard-working. It means writing essays twice as long at least as the minimum length specified by teachers, trying to read _everything_ in the Hogwarts library, and studying for exams from pretty much the morning of the first full day in Hogwarts. It means pestering the prefects and head of house for if there's any work which needs doing? Sirius Black likes the idea of doing lots and lots of work, to prove what a Hufflepuff he is, and to disassociate himself from his family and their whole coasting along on money and reputation.

Albus Dumbledore, of course makes a mental note to keep a _very_ careful eye on this particular member of the Black family. What Sirius is doing, in the context of where he's come from, disconcerts the Hogwarts headmaster, slightly.

Lily Evans is completely beneath Albus Dumbledore's attention – muggle-borns and Hufflepuff are something which go together, naturally.

The Hogwarts headmaster is more concerned with what he's going to do about the divination post in a few years, once the current incumbent retires, than about Lily Evans.

Time ticks by, and children grow. Lord Voldemort of course is happy, or at least as happy as his condition and the fact that the war has not yet achieved his desired result permit him to be. He has his set of horcruxes – four founders' objects, the diary, and his ancestral ring – and a 'sevenfold soul'. Sometimes Bellatrix overdoes her affections for him; it really would be better if she had a husband, but both Rodolphus and Rabastan Lestrange are dead of course.

Lord Voldemort occasionally gets reports of what is taking place in Hogwarts. His interest in Hufflepuff house tends to be viewed through the lens of these mostly being ministry-fodder or slaves of Albus Dumbledore. They're worth keeping an eye on, but the much more significant witches and wizards tend to sort into one of the other three houses. A Hufflepuff will get a job done… eventually… but is unlikely to amount to much spectacular, unless somehow the Sorting Hat made a mistake and put a pupil in the wrong house.

But Lord Voldemort has never yet met a person that the Sorting Hat put in the wrong house, except maybe Albus Dumbledore.

Children grow, towards adulthood, at Hogwarts, and Lord Voldemort keeps track of the ones who sound to him to have the most promise, readying agents to extend to them offers once they are old enough to leave.

Lord Voldemort hears rumours of Albus having smuggled a _werewolf_ into the school, amongst the ranks of all the other pupils, and thinks that that sounds promising and interesting…

* * *

Ever since his narrow escape from injury in a ceiling-collapse, Albus Dumbledore has suspicions that _someone_ at Hogwarts may mean him ill – the sort of power which it would take to have caused something like that to take place from outside the school grounds is frankly mindboggling, and no witch or wizard in their right minds, Albus is convinced, would employ such methods. So Albus tends to keep an eye on pupils and their private projects, and to turn up, unexpectedly, when they are in the middle of trying something or other out which is outside of the normal Hogwarts curriculum.

"And what, boy, is that which you are using?" the headmaster surprises Severus Snape on one such occasion.

"A… a… a cutting spell, sir." Severus Snape stammers. "One of my own invention."

Albus Dumbledore pushes his spectacles up his nose and subjects Severus Snape to a particularly _hard_ look.

"And what do you intend to use such a thing _for_?"

"Err… umm… for tailoring." Severus says the first thing which comes into his head, perhaps nudged by something which has Lord Voldemort very firmly in its sights over the use of a monkey's paw. Fortunately for Severus, the headmaster takes that momentary stammer as being of embarrassment, rather than a moment of desperately trying to invent something. Even more fortunately (although it might not seem that way in time) for Severus, this is something close to Albus' heart.

Albus Dumbledore _beams_ seraphically, his entire face lighting up and utterly transformed.

"Tailoring, boy? Why, I happen to know some high-end robes-makers in the industry in Chinon and Milan, who I really _must_ introduce you to, if that noble pursuit is indeed your goal. What did you say your name was, by the way?"

And so Severus Snape becomes unavoidably entangled in a career, which before the headmaster's advent he had certainly never envisioned as a possibility for himself. However: trying to back out of something which Albus Dumbledore is going to such _pains_ to launch you upon is Definitely Not A Good Idea.

* * *

Sirius Black becomes enamoured of a daughter of the Evans family – the _other_ one; the _muggle_ one: Petunia Evans.

Sirius' family, the Blacks, almost have collective heart-attacks when they hear of this. They threaten to cast him out and cut him off, entirely, unless he drops the muggle at once.

Sirius tells them that he is a Hufflepuff, and that he will of course be delighted to _work hard for a living_.

Meanwhile, whilst high melodrama and farce are playing out in the Black family (and Albus Dumbledore finally considers his suspicions of a Black of malevolent intent in Hufflepuff allayed – even the darkest of Blacks would surely not go _this_ far just to maintain cover for some kind of infernal scheme), prophecy has been working away on the mind of Lily Evans.

She knows what it was _predicted_ that she would do and which it is _meant_ that she do. It's just that as she gets older, whilst some of it _does_ sound fun, a lot of it also sounds like very hard work – except she's a _Hufflepuff_ ; she's supposed to like hard work, isn't she?

This is her equivalent 'step aside and live' moment of choice and of doubt, which in another universe in which Lord Voldemort had not wished upon a monkey's paw she would have dealt with considerably faster and more easily.

Although _obviously_ this isn't a choice which involves her immediate death as one option in this universe – Lord Voldemort (unfortunately for himself) ruled that one out with his conceited-with-his-own-cleverness wishes, undoing Harry Potter.

It's a stupid article in _Witch Weekly_ in the end which decides her.

One Hogsmeade weekend after that, Lily Evans seduces and _ravishes_ Severus Snape, in a rented room in The Hog's Head. She ravishes Severus Snape _repeatedly_. There's a prophecy waiting to be fulfilled, after all, and she may as well get on with it as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, in Slytherin and Gryffindor houses, future Death-Eaters-in-the-making are blissfully unaware of all the spells and potions inventions with which they will not be armed in this universe; and their master-to-be, Lord Voldemort, admires his collection of horcruxes.

Lord Voldemort probably _ought_ to split them up completely, to hide them, and the disguised trip he made into Hogwarts to retrieve the diadem from where he had previously placed it was a considerable risk and nuisance to have to make, but it just feels so _good_ in a thoroughly evil kind of way to have four founders' relics all grouped together in his own private cache.

Obviously the diary and ring can be kept separately.

At the moment, he's managing to keep them all a secret; it's the kind of secret though that in the case of the founders' relics he _really_ would like to share with others, so that they can properly admire his cleverness in assembling four such items…

* * *

Lily Evans (soon to be Lily Snape) did calculate, when it came to the severe ravishing which she administered as an opening gambit, that she should be able to clear her NEWTs still, unaffected – even if things 'got underway' at once.

As it turned out, she miscounted, slightly, and had to cope with feeling queasy on the last couple of days of NEWTs; fortunately pretty much all her revision is over by then, and there's just the final exams themselves to actually cope with.

All things considered, she has by this point decided that Severus does not 'need to know' the bit of that mad fortune teller's prophecy which she's never mentioned to him thus far. It's about _her_ after all, not him.

She does sort-of-indicate to her (at the current time boyfriend) that she _really_ wants a big family though – in between 'buttering up' exercises.

* * *

Regardless of NEWT results arriving and years graduating from Hogwarts, the British Wizarding War carries on; sometimes one side has the upper hand, and sometimes another does. Fleamont Potter dies and leaves the family heirloom invisibility cloak to the wizard he admires for his defeat of Gellert Grindelwald, Albus Dumbledore. Albus does not particularly pay much attention to this bequest at this time; he's too busy ensuring that the Ministry of Magic don't lose the war.

Meanwhile, on the educational front, Albus Dumbledore quietly ditches the 'divination' subject at Hogwrts and replaces it with optional music classes. Sybill Trelawney carries on with her career as a 'fortune teller' at muggle events, her application to teach at Hogwarts rejected.

Spies and traitors go about their business, often undetected. Those who fight on the frontlines are considerably more obvious in their doings and occasionally die.

The surviving Blacks do the maths one day in 1980, after the heir of their house, Regulus, fails to come home from what was supposed to be a meeting about training house-elves and send for Sirius Evans.

The surviving Blacks ask Sirius to pretty please consider retaking the name of his ancestors, and the woman who by this time is now his muggle wife can even have it too; by this point the Blacks most likely to object are all dead, anyway.

Sirius asks if this has anything to do with his younger brother's having recently run off to Brazil with a cross-dressing boa-snake animagus, and another Black drops dead – from apoplexy, this time.

Petunia chides her husband, in a frigid tone, for just dropping the news on his elders like that. There is a proper way to convey news; a respectful, non-shocking way to convey news; a perfectly staid way to convey news.

Petunia then proceeds to give an example of how _she_ thinks news should be conveyed, indicating the sizeable investment which Regulus made in an 'India rubber mine' just before he departed. Apparently Regulus never paid sufficient attention in herbology or potions to discover that India rubber comes from _trees_ , not out of excavations in the ground. The 'director' of the company which Regulus invested in, was incidentally one 'Mundungus Fletcher'.

Nobody drops dead from this news, although it is at least as shocking in its own way as the cross-dressing boa-snake animagus piece, and with additional severe financial ramifications.

The Blacks are grateful for Petunia's tact; they are also persuaded to invest some of their surviving liquid capital in a muggle drilling company which she knows someone on the management side of.

They decide that given she has a sister who is a muggle-born witch, they can plausibly invent a squib ancestor for her to provide a necessary fig-leaf of magical ancestry, if there aren't any which can actually be discovered lurking in her family tree.

The world carries on turning.

* * *

October the 31st of 1981 is a bad day for Lord Voldemort, because there may be no Harry Potter in this universe, but that doesn't mean that Lord Voldemort is going to get away with absolutely nothing going wrong for him and his cause upon it. The British aurors gain snappy new uniforms, made by an up and coming new wizard tailoring business, which make the British aurors look and feel good boosting their morale, intimidates their enemies, and are extremely convenient in terms of movement in situations which call for stealth or for combat. With the passage of months, this will prove decisive. And in the evening, disaster hits Lucius Malfoy. It hits the Lovegood family too, since there is a rather confusing fight, in which Xenophilius and his wife are killed, but Lucius loses an eye and a leg during proceedings.

And, in her haste to create an alibi for her husband, who has the authorities now hot on his trail, Narcissa Malfoy rather overdoes a dose of Imperius Curse which she applies to him – and Lucius Malfoy spends the rest of his days with his mind slightly addled. He escapes Azkaban, but carries a firm conviction for the rest of his life that he is in fact not a wizard but a pirate.

The orphaned Lovegood infant, Phoebe Lovegood, is adopted by an Arabian wizard, and disappears from Wizarding Britain. There will be no Lovegood child with an interest in nargles in this universe.

* * *

1982 is notable for being the year in which Gilderoy Lockhart graduates from Hogwarts and – desperate to be rightfully entitled to wear the uniform – applies to join the British aurors.

* * *

It's September of 1985, and a couple of years now since the last gasps of the war against You-Know-Who were felt. The Death Eaters sort of lost in the end and their leadership was either ratted out by underlings or sort-of-disappeared.

Lily Snape sometimes wonders what kind of woman or witch she'd now be, if she hadn't gone 'all in' in the believing-that-prophecy stakes.

She's changed hugely in the last seven years – she _felt_ different in some meaningfully significant way the moment that she signed the register and became 'Mrs. Snape' – and not all of it is in ways she would have foreseen.

Occasionally she has odd – and rather disturbing dreams – about a boy being attacked and 'eaten' by a dinosaur skeleton. She has carried out research, from a curiosity point of view, and discovered that there was in fact a magical child – one 'James Potter' – who was involved in just such an incident on Hallowe'en 1970. What this has to do with her, she has no idea. One of her daughters is called 'Jemima' though, in case the dream is in some way important.

She's currently reclining on a sun-lounger on a beach on the Côte d'Azur, in a straw sunhat, working on her suntan. She has a glamour on her to make it look as if she's wearing a bikini top and bottom, but she is in fact wearing nothing at all apart from the hat, some sunglasses, and the occasional errant bread crumb. There was a photo-shoot for a Greek magazine of the wizarding world this morning, _Aphrodite Uncloaked_ , and there are a couple more tomorrow and the day after. Severus doesn't like the photo-shoots, let alone being a 'supporting actor' in them, but he likes the idea of anyone else being in them in the role even less. And it's good for one of the independent product lines of the business – free advertising.

Lily has a discreetly extension-charmed sandwich basket positioned next to her on the sand on one side, and her wand planted tip-down into the beach on the other, as if it were a random stick which just _coincidentally_ happens to be within easy reach of her main hand.

The extension charm on the sandwich basket is mandatory, given how big with child she is at the moment, and the matching appetites; it's the only convenient way to get enough food and drink into it to satisfy her calorie needs for a marathon sunbathing session like this.

She's about a month out from delivering twins, she reckons; she hasn't had twins before, and there may of course be a way to use it in the press.

Her muggle sister, with her 'perfect' aristocratic husband, and her 'perfect' _two_ children, and her 'perfect' income from her husband's North Sea oil operations manager job isn't overly fond of Lily these days, or at least not of Lily's _vulgar_ self-promotion in ' _those_ sort of publications.'

Lily _likes_ her brother-in-law, Sirius, but boy, can her sister be annoying. She's mildly curious how her nephew and niece 'turn out' in the end.

Severus is currently out somewhere with the Snape children and no doubt psychologically bracing himself for tomorrow's photo-shoot. It's almost _unfair_ the ease and speed with which _he_ acquires a tan, without risk of burning, whilst Lily is all potions and lotions needed which of course _then_ require her to spend hours sunning herself – and of course when she's _this_ big getting her back evenly tanned requires something other than simply lying on her tummy. Fortunately none of her children – to date – have acquired her red hair and the awkward-to-tan complexion which goes with that.

Still: it would have been nice if Severus had gone in for potions-brewing more, and could take the time to invent better tanning lotions for Lily, instead of having fanatically gone in for tailoring. Except in that circumstance she might well end up tanning with less bother, but would probably be considerably less well dressed – well less well dressed when wearing anything more than a hat and sunglasses, obviously.

Lily retrieves another baguette from the picnic basket, and contributes a pile more calories towards swelling further her most notably feminine regions.

* * *

It is December of 1985 and it has been a week since the Hogwarts term ended and those pupils going back to their families from Christmas returned. Bill Weasley was one such pupil, and he has secured his room with a good deal of care against invasion of any kind, but he is out at the moment with friends. Determined to clean her prodigy of an eldest son's bedroom, Molly Weasley breaks the wards and ventures into territory belonging to a teenage male wizard. For a while, she tuts and fusses, restoring order, and then she comes upon a magazine hidden underneath the pillow of the bed.

Her shriek of outrage, as she discovers that her son is the owner of an 'English Language translation edition' of _Aphrodite Uncloaked_ (December 1985 issue) shakes the house and can be heard in the garden, where it causes gnomes foraging for worms to hastily dive for their holes, fearing an imminent dragon attack.

A couple of minutes later Molly's husband, Arthur, blushes ever so slightly when his trembling wife thrusts her discovery at him, announces where she found it, and demands that he 'do something.'

He flicks through the magazine trying not to _too_ obviously pay attention to the frequent nude or near-nude images of (usually) human bodies.

An article by one 'Eris Katteer' _does_ catch his eye however.

"Well, umm, I guess we could always try _this_." Arthur says.

"No. I meant about our oldest…" Molly begins, but then the article catches her eye. "Umm. Ahh. Yes. I suppose we _could_ try that. Still: I think this magazine is a bit too 'mature' for Bill to have in his possession."

* * *

The Dark Wizard known variously as 'You-Know-Who', 'He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named', 'Lord Voldemort', 'The Dark Lord', 'Tom Marvolo Riddle' and 'Hissy Daddykins' (the last being tolerated only under particular duress and in exactly _one_ case) spends Christmas of 1985 in Las Vegas. Bellatrix _likes_ the United States of America, not least because if she's careful she can murder a dozen muggles in a week and nobody who it might matter about will notice.

Lord Voldemort is in Las Vegas because (distasteful though it is to sink to _mere_ robbery) he is assembling a 'crew' of muggles to 'knock over' a 'mob' casino vault. He needs cash and valuables. Even muggle cash and valuables. And selling his precious collection of Founders' relics is out of the question. He will _not_ repeat his weak-willed mother's mistakes.

To be frank, he could probably simply empty the contents of most such vaults in the city on his own in half an hour, without any muggle assistance at all, but not without using such an _enormous_ amount of magic that even those idiots at MACUSA might notice. If he's part of a group of muggles and keeps magic use to an absolute minimum, MACUSA will presumably ignore the robbery as being 'outside their jurisdiction' even if they subsequently hear about it, and the muggle authorities will simply give up in the end trying to track down the mysterious 'thirteenth man', even if they eventually locate and round up the twelve muggles.

Not that they _will_ ever locate the muggles, if the muggles do their parts properly and keep their heads down afterwards; he _is_ Lord Voldemort, and his plans are almost always flawless. (Occasionally in moments of nagging doubt, he wonders if imbuing the Sword of Gryffindor with a part of his soul has in some fashion affected his judgement, and caused a tendency to come up with spectacularly grandiose plans, but of course he swiftly squashes such thoughts. And there is in any case _nothing at all Gryffindor about robbing what amounts to a muggle mob bank, whilst using as little magic as possible, despite heavily armed muggle guards, complicated muggle security measures, and using a group of muggle associates as assistants who must of course all come out of things entirely alive_ – that is entirely an endeavour worthy of and appropriate for a Slytherin.)

The only person permitted to call him 'Hissy Daddykins' and to retain her life wanders into the main room of the suite, sucking her thumb and clutching a rolled up magazine in the other hand. It looks like she's found Bellatrix's latest issue of _Aphrodite Uncloaked_. Bellatrix gets the Greek version of course (she is fluent in half a dozen languages, and can make herself understood in a dozen more, which is why Lord Voldemort keeps Bellatrix around still, after the war concluded so badly for his cause.) Apparently Bellatrix likes the images of 'witches with whips' which tend to feature in each issue, and has even written (under an alias of course) a couple of times to the editors to volunteer her own services as a model for photo-shoots (although without success so far.)

"Mummy has a picture mag." the child pops her thumb out of her mouth and waves the magazine around.

"It is your mother's sole indulgence." Lord Voldemort tells the child. The child's intelligence for her age and her ability to ask questions is entirely remarkable. He will severely regret it if circumstances ever require that he render her down into ingredients for some potion or ritual.

"What's an indulgence?"

"In this case pictures of nude or nearly nude witches and wizards, some of them doing 'dominatrix' things."

Utterly reprehensible things of course – and as Lord Voldemort, his judgement of what _is_ truly 'reprehensible' is of course quite without fault.

Bellatrix _tries_ to sometimes get him to do such things with her, but he's been a lot more cautious about things like that since Delphini 'happened'. It would be a nuisance to have another such around, if he or she turned out to similarly inspire such trepidation at the thought of breaking them down for their 'ingredient' value.

He is Lord Voldemort. He is not at all sentimental, in any kind of weak-willed, soppy, way.

"Okay." the child nods, as if this makes sense to her, entirely.

Delphini opens the magazine and has a look through it, holding it variously the right way up and upside down – no doubt to see if some of the pictures make more sense in different orientations.

And then she drops the magazine, says 'Goodnight Hissy Daddykins' and wanders off, popping her thumb back into her mouth.

Lord Voldemort moves to tidy up the magazine from the floor, to return it to somewhere that Bellatrix will be able to find it, and as he does so, he is unaware that the redheaded enormously pregnant suntanned witch of the centrefold, with red-silk custom-fitted underwear trimmed with white ermine fur and identified as what amounts to 'Ms. Christmas Day, 1985' (and who is attended by a mysterious man in a black silk mask) is in fact his fate-assigned nemesis.

Lord Voldemort _really_ shouldn't have wished upon that monkey's paw. Defeat by Harry James Potter would have been much _kinder_ than what is coming.

* * *

Author Notes: (basic version, December 27th 2018; subject to expansion)

The fossil tyrannosaurus rex skeleton and dark goings-on on Hallowe'en are a narrative tip of the hat to author Jim Butcher's _Dresden files_ universe.

Chinon is an old French town which (in the real world) hosts an annual 'Medieval Market'. In some Harry Potter fanfictions which I write, I assign the French magical shopping district equivalent to 'Diagon Alley' to Chinon. At the date of the first posting of this piece (in December 2018) there has been no 'official pronouncement' from J. K. Rowling of which I am aware identifying or locating any French counterpart to Diagon Alley.

Regulus Black is never involved in this universe with Lord Voldemort hiding a Horcrux, and so lives long enough to run off to Brazil with the mentioned cross-dressing boa-snake animagus.

Severus Snape's new business is to blame for the auror robes in 1981. They are assumed, amongst other things, to be sufficiently well trimmed not to catch in things and to have well positioned and easy to access (by the wearer) pockets.

Petunia and Sirius are assumed to have a boy and a girl (both magical). Provisionally the children's names are Dudley and Meryl, named after stars – muggle _film_ stars.

As far as I am aware there is (in December 2018) no real world (or in-universe Harry Potter) publication by the name of _Aphrodite Uncloaked_. Aphrodite (in real world Greek mythology) was a figure associated (amongst other things) with beauty. _Aphrodite Uncloaked_ is assumed at the time of this note to come out either three or four times a year (I'm undecided which.)

'Eris Katteer' is an anagram of 'Rita Skeeter', who is assumed to write articles to supplement her regular income for _Aphrodite Uncloaked_.

Lord Voldemort planning to rob a Las Vegas Casino is a narrative tip of the hat to a couple of the films of the _Ocean's Eleven_ franchise. Lord Voldemort is in a state of complete denial about some of the Gryffindor-ish tendencies which he has been acquiring since he turned the Sword of Gryffindor into a horcrux.

I'm undecided on when Delphini was born, but it was probably at some point in 1980 or 1981. She is assumed to be ridiculously clever for her age.

Just to clarify, 'Ms. Christmas Day, 1985' _is_ Lily. There have been no prophecies pertaining to Lord Voldemort made in this universe, as of 1985, other than the one which Lily received in 1971 and (although Lily mentioned bits to Severus about Hufflepuff) Lily is the only person aware of the full prophecy. There is no record of it in the Department of Mysteries.

Peter Pettigrew and Remus Lupin are assumed to do various spying and traitor stuff after they leave Hogwarts in 1978. I have no idea at the time of this note which sides (if any) they're actually loyal to. They did probably make friends with each other, though, in Gryffindor, during their time at Hogwarts.

As a reminder, this piece is a one-shot; partly because I'm not sure that I dare look in detail at what it is that Lord Voldemort has coming which is _worse_ than his canon self-humiliation of repeatedly trying to kill someone with one spell which hasn't worked for that purpose on that person before, followed up by killing himself because the wand in his hand isn't actually his – and this after he's been specifically _told_ that the wand isn't his. If I do take a look and discover something that will be allowed to be posted by the ratings scheme of this website, a PART II will be along.


End file.
